Downscaled climate change projections over Spain: application to water resources

Evaluation of impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change for sectors sensitive to climate conditions requires climate change projections with adequate resolution, both spatial and temporal. These projections are affected by uncertainties coming from a number of sources. The probabilistic approach is the natural framework for integrating uncertainties of diverse origin in the estimation of climate evolution. Two state-of-the-art data-sets are presented, providing downscaled climate change projections over Spain based on ensembles of projections for a variety of emission scenarios, global models and downscaling techniques. Results are applied to the Spanish region of Aragon as an example of the estimation of mean and extreme precipitation changes for the twenty-first century and their uncertainty.